The accuracy of patient care records is important to many facets of a patient's care, including the quality of care and billing. When a clinician documents a service, such as a visit with a patient, the clinician may copy the contents of a previously-written clinical document as a starting point. While improving the clinician's efficiency in drafting the clinical document, this can lead to a variety of issues, such as intentional or unintentional duplication of portions of the previously-written clinical document that do not apply to the current encounter or service. If care is not taken, incorrect information may be entered into a clinical document in cases where the duplication carries forward information that is not corrected or amended. This can lead to confusion, errors, or billing inaccuracies.
Additionally, clinical documents can be lengthy, and thus it would take a clinician a significant amount of time to manually compare two clinical documents to one another either for the purpose of determining similarities between documents or to catch up on a patient's care. This is especially the case when large quantities of documents are to be compared to one another for auditing purposes. Even further, while the clinician is drafting a clinical document, it would be nearly impossible for a clinician to manually compare that clinical document to other clinical documents.